The most extreme virtue-signal is to go completely browser-default and have no styling whatsoever. Like lowercasing because your pinky can't be arsed to reach for the shift-key even though you've a billion dollars in series A.
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The hard-coded Geico ad really ties it all together
My god, it's perfect.
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="MSHTML 8.00.6001.18828"></head>
<body link="#800080" bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000080" vlink="#ff0000"><b><font size="6">
<p align="center">B</font><font size="4">ERKSHIRE </font>
> If you have any comments about our WEB page
Haha, this webpage on the inter network is amazing
Ok, now I'm tempted to buy BRK-B (BRK-A a bit too pricey...)
Ew. I mean 500 bytes of CSS would make this so much better.
No. It’s perfect as is. I can find everything I want. Everything is accessible to everyone and screen readers. Does not require JavaScript.
The home page links are teeny tiny on a phone screen, borderline unreadable.
That's because phone browsers have the insane braindead default of scaling everything into tiny unreadableness. You have to explicitly say "stupid browser, nobody ever wanted this shit, behave sensibly by including <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">. No idea why this idiotic custom still hasn't been purged from mobile browsers, but I guess it's just a valuable tradition now...
Before mobile browsers arrived, everything was fine and nobody needed meta viewport stuff. That's why this 1997 era page doesn't have it.
> everything was fine
Everything was fine best viewed in IE5.5 at 1024x768. Time has changed.
If only there was a way to zoom, on your phone?!
If only you could add 500 bytes of CSS so the content fits the screen.
> Does not require JavaScript
Who mentioned JavaScript?
They did - their list wasn’t all related to _your_ post, other than to say the site is “perfect” to them, after which they enumerated the reasons including “does not require JavaScript”
I've mostly stopped caring about using using proper capitalization, commas, grammar and spelling in my writing of comments, primarily as a signal that i'm not an llm.
If you turn on HN's "Show Dead" setting, there are tons of LLM-generated comments on stories related to AI. You can see the human(s) behind the LLM trying to fiddle with the style of comment by making them skip proper grammar, capitalization, use or avoid certain phrases, and so on. The biggest tell for LLM content, though, is just the content as a whole: it sounds fake and ungenuine, like it passed through a committee of hostage negotiators to remove the speaker's own attachment/expectations.
They can configure it to use all lowercase letters, skip em-dashes, make grammar mistakes, stop saying "it's not X, it's Y", or whatever, yet the content itself just has a fake quality to it that makes it stand out, which is why those comments still get flagged IMO.
The uncanny valley of text. It looks and sounds like a human, but lacks the "soul" / humanity that our intuition somehow perceives.
It's really strange... I see some text with obvious tropes and sometimes I read something and there's no obvious AI trope... but it's just not human?
> The uncanny valley of text.
Exactly, that's a great way to describe it.
And yet, while on HN we're critical readers and can still see through it, there's many places on the internet where it just wouldn't stand out. I try to avoid them, but they would just blend in to e.g. youtube comments.
Unless the YT comments I've read have been bots since forever.
My big gripe with LLMs is the “high verbosity but low signal” style of their writing. Even the new 4.8 Opus writes like that, it’ll spit out a paragraph of verbiage for what could’ve been one sentence. I’m guessing… because we pay by output tokens? $-)
i mean, i definitely agree and am somehow allergic to seeing llm written text from other humans (you typed a prompt! why not just post it directly? i'd rather have bad spelling and grammar than llm slop). but... while i feel i can detect it pretty reliably in forums like HN, i can't help but think that this is the toupée fallacy[0] at work. of course, all the text that _i_ think is fake is clearly fake after all
I had this conversation the other day. I'm a native German speaker originally, which is why I hand out commas like it's candy and capitalize things unnecessarily. Sometimes I notice these things and leave them in when I write something, since at least it gives you a good indication that a human wrote it... for now.
I stopped doing that long before LLMs were commonplace because I couldn't see a point in it. Like, the entire concept of spelling and grammar is arbitrary anyway. Proper English and spelling of the 20th century is not the same proper English and spelling of the 18th century.
For example, "you" was originally the formal form of the second person pronoun, and thee or thou the informal form. Many writers who try to write midieval period pieces tend to get this wrong though and just use thee or thou as a direct replacement for "you."
And then English spelling and pronunciation is just chaotic anyway.
I won't go out of my way to misspell things and I'll do my best to use the best grammar and spelling I can, but I'm not going to consult an llm or grammarly to make sure it'll get no notes from an English teacher when my only purpose is to comment on HN or write a quick update on slack.
Claude's "write me a product description like a cool human would" is just using lower-case where it shouldn't be though.
The problem is that omitting capitalization, commas, and so on signals, in addition to "not AI in default settings", but also "I'm part of the San Francisco AI in-crowd and Altman is my spirit animal".
"Countersignaling" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersignaling) might be the better word: "Countersignaling is the behavior in which agents with the highest level of a given property invest less into proving it than individuals with a medium level of the same property."
This is a great one to put in my vocabulary. It also ties into the "vocal minority" thing where people that aren't actually the best people to talk about an issue are the most visible.
Virtue-signalling or just the daddy?
Array language proponents also like to do this. In their case I‘ll allow it, it matches the substance.
Can you link to a genuine example?
Minimalist example: https://kona.github.io/
Extremely Minimalist example: https://k.nyc/
In the pages you linked there's not much writing to really get a taste (https://k.nyc responds with an unclosed <div> containing the letter k, come on), but I found some language examples in
* https://codeberg.org/growler/k/pulls/
* https://codeberg.org/growler/k/issues
User @growler writes in succinct sentences and uses only periods.
I'm having fun with the idea, in my head, that using array languages changes how you speak and write.
HN commenters have also pointed out the peculiar way ngn/k writes C:
I didn’t find the examples I was thinking of unfortunately.
But yeah it’s a very peculiar kind of Zen, all-encompassing.
Netscape knows best.
Give me Navigator or give me death
Ah yes, the jeevacation special
Craziest m'island
lowercasing everything -- just means
you're literate smart... poetic; because
you read e.e.cummings
and william carlos
williams
...
fin.
Instructions unclear, am will.i.am
I hate
this
style of
"poetry"
rupi.
without substance,
but words
aligned —
on a
page.